Murder at Moose Jaw (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  ‘What memo?’

  For answer, Parkinson stood up and walked over to the iron-grey filing cabinet, opened a drawer, pulled out a file and extracted a carbon copy of one of the departmental memos which sprayed forth from his desk like confetti. He handed it to Bognor, who read it.

  ‘From HOO (SODBOT) to SI BOGNOR (SODBOT (CC & P)).’ This meant ‘From Head of Operations (Special Operations Department, Board of Trade) to Special Investigator Bognor (Special Operations Department, Board of Trade (Codes, Ciphers and Protocol)).’ The message was succinct, but clear. ‘Re your persistent requests for transfer I am pleased to tell you that subject to availability, medical, interview etc. etc. this has now gained approval. Your successor in this department will be SI Lingard of Teddington branch who will be joining us on 18th inst. and to whom you are to give every assistance during the necessary period of transition.’

  ‘Of course.’ Bognor bit back the smile. ‘I’d quite forgotten today was the 18th inst. Silly me. By the way, how long exactly is the “necessary period of transition”, would you say?’

  Parkinson gave virtually no indication that he was either sceptical or credulous regarding his subordinate’s amnesia. His eyes suggested amusement, but the rest of his expression was frankly frigid. ‘Could be a matter of weeks … or years. It depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘Bognor, I have better things to do than discuss your dubious future, and there is the more immediate problem of the Master’s murder. This man Mitten will be here in a matter of minutes, and I should like to think that we are properly prepared. So may we proceed?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Bognor felt a little better now. He sat back in the regulation hard-backed, imitation leather chair and smiled up at the Queen. She was beginning to go a little sepia at the edges. Almost time for a replacement.

  ‘Now.’ Parkinson shuffled papers with the dexterity of the useful bridge player he was reputed to be. ‘This Mitten. We have nothing on file. What can you tell me?’

  ‘He was my tutor. Well, one of my tutors.’

  ‘Not an absolutely wonderful recommendation.’ This time Parkinson was being humorous. Marginally.

  Bognor took only mild umbrage. ‘Sixteenth-century English history is his speciality. Rise and fall of the gentry. Pre-Elizabethan mainly. Knows more about Henry VIII than any man alive. He did the screenplay for that BBC series called The Other Cromwell.’

  Parkinson scribbled. ‘Trustworthy?’ he inquired, not looking up. ‘Sound? Liked? Respected?’

  ‘Um,’ said Bognor, and hesitated. ‘Not entirely, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.’

  ‘Have a teeny try.’ Parkinson smiled encouragingly. He was used to dealing with Bognor. You had to treat him like a boy of about … twelve, he supposed … maybe thirteen. At least that was his experience. Occasionally he took you by surprise, but twelve or thirteen was usually about right. At least that was how Parkinson did treat him. It had never occurred to him to treat him like an adult. He doubted whether it would be very successful.

  ‘There’s something phoney about him,’ said Bognor, obviously trying hard. ‘For example, he is the Hon. Waldegrave Mitten, but he’s only the younger son of Ernest Mitten, the socialist food freak. Got a peerage from Attlee. Something to do with snoek.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well it doesn’t, you know, make him the thirteenth son of the thirteenth earl or anything, but to see the way he dresses and the way he talks you’d think he was a Cecil or a Cavendish at the very least.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Parkinson did some more scribbling.

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Not that I’ve ever heard of.’

  Parkinson drummed on the desk with his fingers. ‘Popular sort of fellow, is he? With his colleagues? With his students?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Bognor, ‘but only quite. He works too hard at it. Too, you know, ingratiating. I suspect his pupils like him more than his colleagues.’

  ‘Does he have women?’

  ‘He takes women out. Wines and dines them. Invites them to Glyndebourne and Henley. But I’d be quite surprised if he beds them.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Parkinson asked sharply, genuine interest creeping into his voice for the first time during the interrogation.

  ‘Instinct.’ Bognor regretted uttering the word as soon as it had issued forth.

  ‘The trouble this department has had with that instinct of yours, Bognor.’ Parkinson was writing as he spoke. ‘Men have died for your instinct. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Up to a point.’

  Parkinson sucked his teeth. ‘Bit of a Bertie Wooftah, is that what you’re trying to tell me? Eh? Is that it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Then what would you say?’

  ‘Bit of a nothing, sexually. But I think he’s very concerned to suggest otherwise.’

  ‘No reason why he should have killed off the Master himself?’

  ‘Not that I can think of. No, none.’

  ‘Ambitious, is he?’

  ‘Yes, pretty.’

  ‘He’d fancy being the Master of Apocrypha, would he?’

  Bognor considered this for a few moments. It had never really occurred to him before.

  ‘I think he’d prefer to have the respect of his peers,’ he ventured tentatively. ‘He’s not taken very seriously as a historian. Professional academics are childishly supercilious about colleagues who pander to popular taste. Particularly if they make a bundle out of some TV series.’

  ‘I thought The Other Cromwell was very fine,’ said Parkinson, tetchily. ‘So did Mrs Parkinson, and she is quite an authority. She has, I may say, read every one of Lady Antonia Fraser’s books. And her mother’s.’

  Bognor did not know how to reply to this, but before he was forced into saying something insupportably patronizing he was saved by the bell, or more accurately the buzzer on Parkinson’s desk.

  ‘Mr Mitten and Ms Frinton in reception for you, Mr Parkinson.’

  ‘Then be so good as to send them down.’ Parkinson passed a hand over his scalp, while Bognor experienced a disquieting lurch of the stomach which, unhappily, he recognized as having something to do with emotional/sexual anticipation.

  ‘What’s she doing with him?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah.’ Parkinson rubbed his hands together and smiled in a mildly lascivious manner. ‘I understand you met her the other night. She really is rather special.’

  Bognor felt his jaw betraying him. ‘How do you know I met her the other night?’

  ‘She told me. She’s one of ours, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘What manner of speaking?’

  ‘Principally recruitment.’

  Bognor could no longer repress an expression of incredulity.

  ‘Not all recruitments are as haphazard, and indeed shortsighted, as yours, I’m glad to say,’ said Parkinson. ‘Frinton isn’t just recruiting for us, of course,’ he added. ‘She makes her assessments and pushes people in the direction of whichever branch of the security services she thinks most appropriate.’

  ‘Well!’ said Bognor. ‘I’ve heard some preposterous things, but I do think employing the first woman fellow of Apocrypha as a talent scout for Intelligence just about takes the biscuit.’

  ‘Your male chauvinism, if that’s what it is, does you no credit,’ said Parkinson. ‘Frinton has done some superlative work in the field, quite apart from anything else. Her Hong Kong missions, especially, are classics of their kind.’

  But before Parkinson could expand on this extravagant claim the two dons were ushered in. Mitten was in an ageing tweed suit, brown and well-cut, with a canary-yellow pullover underneath and a woollen tie knotted loosely at the neck. Very much the outfit of a storybook Oxford don of the 1930s – the J. B. Priestley look refined. Hermione Frinton was still in boots, above which she wore a long black skirt, a red waistcoat, a herringbone tweed jacket and
an enormously long silk scarf in the style of Isadora Duncan. Also a beret, very rakishly angled. She was smoking a Black Russian cigarette from a holder. She should have looked ridiculous; instead she made Bognor, who like Parkinson was wearing regulation Board of Trade grey worsted, shiny at the elbows and bagged at the knees, feel drab. Even Parkinson seemed impressed. His eyes glazed momentarily and he came out from behind his desk to make a big show of moving chairs around and ordering coffee.

  Eventually they were all sitting as comfortably as the civil service furniture allowed, and Parkinson began by expressing his condolences. This did not take long and he moved briskly to business.

  ‘I take it the police have been informed?’

  Mitten replied. ‘Oh, yes indeed. We’ve played strictly according to the rules,’ he said. ‘Straight bat to everything. Chief-inspector chappie was round at bulls noon. Normally we don’t let the police in college at all, but in the circumstances it seemed only proper.’

  ‘You were quite right, Professor,’ said Parkinson, causing Mitten a moment’s fleeting embarrassment. ‘And chief-inspector chappie is there right now, I take it?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Mitten looked slightly more embarrassed this time, and Bognor caught Hermione Frinton’s eye. She undoubtedly winked at him. ‘Figure of speech,’ continued Mitten. ‘I forget his name. Hermione?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue, darling. Couldn’t have been Cuff, could it?’

  ‘The name is hardly material,’ said Parkinson snappishly, then tried to redeem himself by flashing an ingratiating smile at Hermione. She did not smile back but flicked ash ostentatiously on to the carpet. A muscle in Parkinson’s temple gave a scarcely perceptible twitch.

  ‘Now as I understand it, this would be a perfectly conventional police investigation but for one or two unusual factors.’ Parkinson assumed his most magisterial professional tone. ‘The most significant of these is, of course, the identity of the deceased. This is bound to make the murder something of a cause célèbre. Then there is the matter of his position as Master and the circumstances surrounding the murder. Obviously you don’t wish the good name of the college to be compromised in any way.’

  ‘There’s been an Apocrypha College in Oxford for almost four hundred and fifty years,’ said Mitten, ‘and this is our first murder.’

  ‘Quite.’ Parkinson pursed his lips. ‘Now from what you told me on the telephone, Lord Beckenham died as the result of some foreign substance of an appropriately deadly nature being administered to him. Do we know what that was?’

  ‘Faversham, our Pathology Fellow, did tell me,’ said Mitten, ‘but I’m afraid it’s slipped my mind.’

  ‘Arsenic?’ suggested Hermione. ‘Strychnine? Paraquat?’

  ‘No,’ said Mitten peevishly, ‘nothing like that. I do hope you’re going to take this seriously, Dr Frinton.’

  Hermione looked up at the ceiling and then made a play of removing the remains of her cigarette from its holder and stubbing it out on the heel of her boot.

  ‘I don’t think the name of the poison is of any more importance at this stage than the name of the chief-inspector,’ said Parkinson, attempting to be placatory. ‘But as I understand it, there is a strong suggestion that the dose may have been given while Lord Beckenham was drinking in your room. And among those present were you, yourself, Professor Mitten, Dr Frinton here, and you, Bognor.’

  ‘Yes,’ they said in unison.

  ‘Which at this stage of the game,’ announced Parkinson, ‘makes all of you, in circumstantial terms, prime suspects.’

  There was a chorus – muted, but unmistakably one of dissent.

  ‘At all events,’ Parkinson went on, ‘your presence on the last occasion the Master was seen alive is certainly enough to fuel speculation. If the Master was killed at your party, Professor, it’s likely that those present are in for a sticky time.’

  ‘He wasn’t killed at my party, Mr Parkinson.’

  The atmosphere had suddenly grown unpleasant. Silence ensued.

  ‘Aren’t we rather jumping the gun?’ asked Bognor, eventually. He smiled round at the three lugubrious faces. ‘Waldegrave hasn’t explained why he’s here at all. I mean I can see that it’s a bit of an embarrassment all round, but despite Lord Beckenham’s fleeting association with the Board of Trade in the dim and distant past, it’s scarcely our pigeon. As you said, it’s a straightforward matter for the CID at Oxford.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Mitten, ‘that it’s going to be in the least straightforward. There was very little straightforward about the Master while he was alive, and I see no reason to think that there will be anything straightforward about him now that he’s dead. And you ought to know, in any case, that there is nothing whatever that is likely to prove straightforward about a murder investigation in Apocrypha.’

  Parkinson sighed. ‘The point is,’ he said heavily, ‘that you at Apocrypha,’ and here he nodded at Mitten, ‘are anxious to solve this matter with the minimum fuss, annoyance, publicity, inconvenience, call it what you will. …’

  Mitten nodded.

  ‘And to make this possible, notice I say possible,’ and here he glared meaningfully at Bognor, ‘to make this possible you have negotiated an understanding with the local constabulary under the terms of which the investigation can be kept, at least partly, how shall I put it – in the family? To wit, you have proposed that since there are two professionals involved already, their involvement should be put on to a basis which has proper authority.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Bognor, very slowly, ‘that you have persuaded the Oxford police to work with myself and Hermione … Dr Frinton?’

  ‘Spot on,’ said Mitten eagerly.

  ‘Oh.’ Bognor oozed unhappiness, not to say disbelief.

  ‘As far as Dr Frinton is concerned,’ said Parkinson, ‘I can only say that it’s a most sagacious decision – and I daresay that unravelling the intricacies of Chinese secret societies will prove markedly similar to doing the same thing in the Senior Common Room.’

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ interjected Mitten, causing Parkinson to blink, but scarcely to pause.

  ‘As for yourself, Bognor, I can only say that I share your incredulity. But far be it from me to stand in the way of town and gown. All I ask is that this time you somehow contrive to organize things in an orderly, methodical and unobtrusive manner which, for once, reflects no discredit on this department.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Bognor.

  2

  ‘IT REALLY IS RATHER bloody.’ Bognor thrust a piece of roll into the garlic butter left behind by his dozen escargots and watched it soak in like bath water entering a loofah.

  His wife pushed a sliver of gherkin to the side of her plate. ‘In what way bloody?’

  ‘The presumption.’ He put the bread in his mouth. ‘Strange men from Teddington sitting at my desk without so much as a by-your-leave. One’s old tutor clicking his fingers and making you come running, just as if he was ordering up your weekly essay. Do this. Do that. I’m too old to be treated like an errant infant.’

  ‘One’s never too old for that.’ Monica drank a little Gewürztraminer. This was a farewell dinner since he was leaving for Oxford first thing next morning.

  ‘Do they really think it was one of you?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think they seriously imagine it was me. Not seriously.’ Bognor dipped bread again and pulled a face. ‘Not that that will stop boring Parkinson making an unending heavy joke out of it. And I don’t think anyone seriously suspects Hermione Frinton. Mitten, well probably not, though from what Parkinson let drop I sense that he thinks Mitten coveted the mastership and knocked the old man off in order to get it.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But who am I to cast doubt on a pet theory belonging to Parkinson? You know Mitten.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Monica. ‘Don’t like him much, either.’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t make him a murderer.’

  ‘Granted.’ She leaned
back in her chair to allow the waiter to remove her plate. ‘But supposing he really did want to be Master of Apocrypha, this was his best chance.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If there was an ordinary election – which there was going to be in about a year’s time, he wouldn’t have an earthly.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘But if he was suddenly thrown into the mastership by a piece of luck like this, he would have a few months to show how well he could do the job and he could go into an election as a strong internal candidate. And as acting Master he’d have a lot of say in how the election was organized.’

  ‘It’s conceivable.’

  The waiter returned, bearing the rack of lamb they were to share. The wine waiter followed with a bottle of Hermitage. There was a natural break in conversation.

  ‘Not a strong enough motive,’ said Bognor. ‘Mitten wants all sorts of things out of life, but the mastership isn’t one of them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ Monica smiled at him. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Did you do it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Monica brushed a stray strand of hair from her eyes. ‘You heard. Did you do it?’ Then she giggled. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘I know you didn’t do it, but Chief-Inspector Chappie doesn’t know.’

  ‘Smith,’ said Bognor, irritably. ‘His name’s Smith. How’s your lamb?’

  ‘Fine. All right then, Smith. He may decide you did it. You obviously had an opportunity, what about motive?’

  Bognor reluctantly decided to enter into the spirit of the game. After all, she was his wife. He was fond of her, and he would not be seeing her until the weekend.

  ‘No motive that I can think of. I liked the old boy.’

  ‘Not good enough. You can kill the thing you love, you know that.’

  ‘I didn’t love him. Just liked him. Quite.’

  ‘That’s better.’ She lowered her eyelids and then looked up at him from under the lashes, mischievously. An old trick, but Bognor still enjoyed the mannerism. ‘I can think of a motive.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He wiped his mouth with a napkin and drank. ‘I think this is a silly game.’